Day by day program.

Concert

Emmanuel Nunes

The oeuvre of Emmanuel Nunes is marked by a unique idea of time, of space, of listening, and by the desire to attain an organic composition.

The idea of large series and large formats brings him closer to his past teacher Stockhausen and Wagner, his eternal beacon. In Nunes' work, the perception of time is a reflection on the length of the perception.

To celebrate the 70th birthday of this Portuguese composer whose path has been intertwined with IRCAM since the end of the 80s, Agora and the Ensemble Remix are offering an encounter between Nunes and Webern, two artists obsessed by the autonomy of musical language and by numerical symbolism. The vividness of symbols (Wandlungen structures its rhetoric around the number 5; the number 3 is omnipresent in the opera Das Märchen) participates in this secret language project. The composer has an affinity for Goethe; The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily became the libretto for Nunes’ opera, betraying also the composer's fascination for metamorphosis, the alchemist’s transmutation of material. The challenges that Nunes' performers meet can be found in musical gestures and not in the idea of "beyond time". Even the meticulous writing of space, controlling the sound’s trajectories connected to the very life of the sound. The obsession with spatialization is found in the instrumental works, as it is in those where musical thought is counterbalanced with computer reasoning. This dramatic tension provokes flickering gaps, signs from afar that provide distance.